Is nutrition science ready for the twenty-first century? Moving towards transdisciplinary impacts in a changing world

Adèle R Tufford,Theo Ockhuizen,Edith F Feskens,Philip C Calder,Pieter Van’T Veer,Aletta D Kraneveld,Jan De Vries,Jan Sikkema

doi:10.1007/s00394-020-02241-0

Abstract

Malnutrition in an obese world was the fitting title of the 13th Federation of European Nutrition Societies (FENS) conference held in October 2019. Many individuals do not eat a healthy, well-balanced diet, and this is now understood to be a major driver of increased disease risk and illness. Moreover, both our current eating patterns and the food system as a whole are environmentally unsustainable, threatening the planetary systems we depend on for survival. As we attempt to feed a growing global population, food systems will increasingly be confronted with their environmental impacts, with the added challenge of climate change-induced threats to food production. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, these challenges demand that the nutrition research community reconsider its scope, concepts, methods, and societal role. At a pre-meeting workshop held at the FENS conference, over 70 researchers active in the field explored ways to advance the discipline’s capacity to address cross-cutting issues of personal, public and planetary health. Using the world cafe method, four themed discussion tables explored (a) the breadth of scientific domains needed to meet the current challenges, (b) the nature and definition of the shifting concepts in nutrition sciences, (c) the next-generation methods required and (d) communication and organisational challenges and opportunities. As a follow-up to earlier work [1], here we report the highlights of the discussions, and propose the next steps to advance responsible research and innovation in the domain of nutritional science.

Highlights

The twenty-first century challenges faced by nutrition scientists are immense: a “triple burden of malnutrition”, namely overnutrition and obesity, undernutrition and nutritional deficiencies [2–4]; unsustainable food supply chains; policy inertia and distrustful consumers
The grand challenge of meaningfully reducing malnutrition in all its forms, and halting the interrelated breakdown of the planetary systems that support all forms of life and health, can only be tackled by transdisciplinary approaches that consider the food system as a whole, including sociocultural factors, built off of collaborative platforms and consortia
Given that diet is the leading cause of poor health globally, and a major driver of the climate crisis, nutrition sciences have a key responsibility and a central role to play in addressing these challenges

Summary

Introduction

The twenty-first century challenges faced by nutrition scientists are immense: a “triple burden of malnutrition”, namely overnutrition and obesity, undernutrition and nutritional deficiencies [2–4]; unsustainable food supply chains; policy inertia and distrustful consumers. Eight major domains were identified by workshop participants: Personal and Public Health, Food Environments and Supply Chain, Diets and Nutrition, Consumer Behaviour, Natural Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Direct Citizen Engagement, and Data Sciences (Fig. 2). Among the eight domains deemed critical for the future of nutrition science, FNH-RI is in the process of building a distributed (i.e. predominantly virtual) pan-European research infrastructure consortium, which will link four critical domains, namely Personal and Public Health, Food Environments and Supply Chains, Diets and Nutrition and Consumer Behaviour. This may mean training or provision of tools for effective policy engagement, to enact change both as it relates to public health/environmental interventions as well as to research funding schemes Together, these groups will devise productive ways to challenge the current structure of funding incentives that hinder systems-level or transdisciplinary approaches, to allow for the funding of more highrisk/high-gain interventions. With more than 4200 authors submitting research at the latest FENS gathering [40], and nearly 13,000 expected users of the FNH-RI (proposal in submission), organising around shared challenges and obstacles will surely generate the momentum needed to ensure nutrition sciences are fit for the twenty-first century

Conclusion

Findings

Compliance with ethical standards